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About the Photographer

Harrison, Andrew

American, b. 1970

Andrew Harrison’s cartographic experiments explore aspects of urban planning using New Jersey as a potential utopia. He ironically rearranges road maps of the Garden State (his home), based on both mythical territories and proposed urban plans such as Sir Walter Raleigh’s vision of El Dorado, the biblical Garden of Eden, and Plato’s lost city of Atlantis. He also refers to Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago, Le Corbusier’s 1935 The Radiant City, and Lucio Costa’s 1957 Pilot Plan for Brasilia. Each newly configured map sources and re-orders the same space—but claims different potential results. This recombination of mythical and ideal narratives onto an alternate place becomes a model for reimagining urban space.

Andrew Harrison holds a BS in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University (1992), an MAT from Johns Hopkins University (1998), and an MFA from Maine College of Art (2008). His work was included in the exhibition Edge of Intent at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in 2009. Other notable exhibitions include Is It Possible to Take a Photograph of New Jersey at Pierro Gallery and Pixel Pop: Wide Open at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.